# Exa AI

- Category: AI search
- Official site: https://exa.ai/
- HTML: https://www.88z.ai/en/tools/exa-ai
- Markdown: https://www.88z.ai/en/tools/exa-ai.md

Exa AI is a real-time knowledge index and retrieval platform built specifically for AI agents.

## What is Exa AI?

Exa AI is a real-time knowledge index and retrieval platform built specifically for AI agents.More than just a search engine, it serves as the foundational infrastructure for providing context to automated intelligence.Exa builds and maintains its own independent index, crawling billions of documents daily to cover both the public web and structured data sources including companies, people, financial markets, and code.

Powered by the Exa 3.0 engine, developers can access everything from low-latency quick results to deep research reports taking approximately 10 seconds through a single endpoint.Its core advantage lies in 'highlights' technology, which extracts the most relevant excerpts from web pages, reducing tokens passed to LLMs by up to 90%.This significantly lowers inference costs while improving answer accuracy.

Trusted by top-tier teams like Cognition (creators of Devin), Exa supports enterprise-grade security standards such as SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA, with a strict zero-data-retention policy.Whether you are building coding assistants, financial analysis tools, or automated lead generation engines, Exa delivers precise, structured, and citable web data.

## Key features

- **Built for Agents**：Offers Search API, Contents API, and Agent API, supporting modes from low-latency (450ms) to deep research (~10s) to meet the real-time data needs of intelligent agents.
- **Token-Efficient**：Extracts the most relevant excerpts (Highlights) from web pages using specialized models, reducing tokens passed to models by up to 90% and significantly lowering usage costs.
- **Structured Data**：Extracts structured information directly from unstructured web pages, covering over 70 million company entities and returning fields like CEO and founding year for easy programmatic processing.
- **Comprehensive Co**：Indexes 2 trillion URLs across multiple verticals including code, news, company info, researchers, and financial data, going beyond general web search.
- **Enterprise-Grade**：SOC 2 Type II audited, compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, with a zero-data-retention promise ensuring queries and results are never stored or used for training.
- **MCP Server Suppo**：Provides a hosted MCP server to easily connect Exa's search, code retrieval, and research tools to Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and other compatible clients.

## How to use it

1. Sign up on the Exa website; no payment method is required to get started.
2. Generate your API Key in the dashboard for authentication.
3. Browse the official documentation to understand parameter configurations for the Search and Contents APIs.
4. Test queries using the API Playground, experimenting with different latency modes (Lite, Auto, Deep) and output formats.
5. Integrate the API into your AI Agent code, leveraging the Highlights feature to optimize token usage.
6. For local development environments, configure the Exa MCP server to integrate with tools like Claude or Cursor.

## Where it fits

- **AI Coding Assist**：Provide coding agents with up-to-date documentation and code repository search results to help solve technical problems while maintaining context relevance.
- **Financial & Mark**：Automatically extract company executives, financial data, and industry news to provide structured decision-making basis for financial analysis agents.
- **Automated Lead G**：Batch find company and contact information based on specific criteria to build high-quality lead lists for sales automation workflows.
- **Deep Research &**：Execute comprehensive research tasks requiring browsing multiple sources, providing accurate answers with citations for complex questions.

## Pricing and free quota

New accounts receive $10 in free credits every month, plus a one-time $10 bonus for completing onboarding.No payment method is required to access all API endpoints.For detailed pricing plans, please refer to the official website.

## Who it is for

- AI Agent Developers
- LLM Application Engineers
- Financial Data Analysis Teams
- Sales Automation Experts
- Enterprise Software Builders

## FAQ

### How is Exa different from traditional search engines?

Exa is designed specifically for AI Agents, offering structured data outputs and token-efficient content extraction (Highlights), rather than just returning lists of links.It focuses on machine readability and contextual relevance.

### Is my data stored?

No.Exa promises zero data retention; your queries and results are never stored or used to train models.

### How do I start using the Exa API?

You can sign up for free on the official website without a credit card to receive $10 in monthly free credits.After signing up, generate an API Key in the dashboard to start making calls.

### Which verticals does Exa support?

Exa's index covers code, news, company information, researchers, financial data, and more, performing exceptionally well in benchmarks for these specific verticals.

## Tags

AI Search API · Agent Infrastructure · Structured Data Extraction · Real-time Web Index

Features, pricing and availability follow the official site. Except for 88z.ai’s own API pages, this is a third-party product; 88z.ai only provides a directory introduction.